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Thursday, March 24, 2016

A Dangerous Symbiosis

The Last Tango in Office

DDGD March 24, 2016

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Today’s
Post is brought to you by…The
Obama Phallacy, now in a theater near you: The fifth installment in
the Obama Series dealing with what happens to Barack Obama when he finally
becomes totally unencumbered by considerations of decency, humanity and even diplomacy.
As Syria goes to hell, Obama goes to Cuba. As Europe does the Twist, he does the
Tango. As others deal with existential threats, he deals with existential angst.
Brought to you by Realist Entertainment – the producers of The Obama Identity,
The Obama Supremacy, The Obama Ultimatum and The Obama Legacy.

A
dangerous symbiosis: The Islamic State is likely to try to carry out
more suicide attacks in the coming weeks and months, because the rise of far
right parties and movements in Europe and the United States is something that
is seen by its leaders as quite the beneficial development as it is bound to radicalize
more Muslims all over the world. In other words, at this stage, the Islamic
State is in effect campaigning hard for Donald
Trump, as well as for Ted
Cruz as a second alternative. And the two men and their Party are giving IS
exactly what it needs to keep on campaigning. Meanwhile, President Obama and the
Realists will keep on refusing to take responsibility for any of that, they
will keep on being proud of their decisions on Syria, and they will keep on
ignoring the fact that Assad and his cronies are the ones directly responsible
for the rise of IS, and
might be in fact be involved in facilitating, one way or another, IS-led
operations in Europe.

Goddamn it! Pardon my
French. But if this is the best America can offer, perhaps what we need at this
stage is to save American values from all those damn Americans. Perhaps, just
perhaps, there are too many “real” Americans in America today for its own good.
Perhaps what we need is to bring in more refugees, not less, so they can help
us save us from ourselves. And if a few Jihadi bastards happened to sneak past
our robust security systems and ended up committing something horrible, perhaps
it’s OK, perhaps to preserve American values we need to be baptized by blood.

Now if you don’t like that damn
logic, remember that this is exactly what lies at the heart of the Realist Code
of Ethics. After all, I just spent the last five year of my life listening to
Realists telling us that we needed to go through this “rough period” in Syria
on our own, that the slaughter taking place there is actually our long-awaited
trial by fire, that only by being slaughtered, tortured, starved and deprived
of our homes and liberties, we would eventually learn to appreciate the value
of freedom and democracy, and mature as a people. So I guess, what works for
the goose…

The Daily Delirynth

Refugenics:
The level of indifference exhibited by some towards the suffering of the Syrian
people shows that they have decided to ignore the dictates of their conscience
and humanity long before they began ignoring those of their reason. Thankfully,
there are notable exceptions in this regard.

It took a while, almost two years
in most cases, before the Syrian Tragedy got on the radar of celebrities.
Eventually, celebrities from all over took notice, especially in read to the
plight of refugees. But despite the tireless efforts of people like Angelina
Jolie, and more recently George
and Amal Clooney, and Jude
Law, among many others, the overall impact on the decision-makers involved
has been minimal, except in the case where the person involved, like Angela
Merkel, have already been on board. Be that as it may, the efforts of our
celebrity activists are quite appreciated, and social media responses have been
quite grateful.

…Obama
effectively compromised on his own doctrine. But why? It turns out that while a
president's philosophy does matter somewhat, bitter domestic politics,
bureaucratic pressures, and what the president derisively referred to as the
"Washington playbook" — the set of standard Washington responses to
international crises — will have a powerful effect on any president's foreign
policy. The larger lesson of America’s screwed-up Syria policy is not that
American inactivity produced chaos or that American meddling made a bad
situation worse. It is that the Washington sausage factory tends to produce an
incoherent foreign policy that satisfies no one, regardless of what the
president thinks.

I have a rather different take on
the matter based on my own experiences and contacts with various Obama
administration officials, former and current, and various organizations working
closely with the administration on outreach to the Syrian opposition and rebel
groups. I believe that out of his commitment to remain true to his Realist
politics, Obama intentionally adopted a series of half-measures in regard to
Syria designed specifically to deflect growing pressure from Congress and, more
importantly, from within the ranks of his administration, but not seriously
designed to help rebels topple the Assad regime, or to help them protect the
areas and towns that came under their control and provide an effective
governance structures there. Achieving that would have required declaring a
series of no-fly zones, or providing TOW missiles to rebels, something the
administration had no interest in providing whatsoever. Indeed, such measures
represented its real red lines.

In fact, the administration had
real reservations on watching rebel groups topple the regime, fearing an Islamist
takeover and ensuing chaos and mayhem. The administration, it seems, wanted to
pressure the regime, then, use its ongoing contacts with Iran and Russia to
convince them to play a more positive role in the political process and for
reaching an agreement that can allow for transition beyond the Assad regime.

The administration support of
rebel groups waxed and waned in accordance with the state of its talks with
Iran and Russia, and how close the rebels came to posing an existential threat
to the regime. Each time, the rebels came close to represent a serious threat
against in the regime in Damascus and Latakia for instance, shipments of
weapons were delayed and any logical support or intelligence sharing that were
being provided were put on hold. This of course, created a major trust gap
between rebels and the administration. But the administration cared little for
that.

Since the administration has
always examined the Syrian Conflict through its Realist Prism, it naturally
predicted that Russian intervention will trap the Russian President Vladimir
Putin in a quagmire. The fact that this failed to happen lends much credence,
albeit belatedly, to what Syrian activists having arguing all along, namely
that serious focused intervention can actually preempt the development of a
quagmire, not cause it.

For the region, the
failure of liberal realism was no less catastrophic than that of messianic
neoconism. But there is an important difference here: the neocons were humbled
and, one way or another, they admitted their mistakes and pulled on the brakes,
especially during President W’s second term in office. The Realists, on the
other hand, continue to congratulate themselves, having restricted their
definition of success to the low material costs directly incurred by the U.S.
irrespective of any human and material costs to others.

Even the administration’s
decision to follow
the Congress’s lead and accuse the Islamic State of perpetrating genocide
against Christians, Yezidis and Shia in Iraq and Syria seems irrelevant and
hollow, since no action will likely follow. Moreover, the decision is bound to
be interpreted by Syria’s Arab Sunni population and by Sunnis around the world
that their lives do not matter, since they have been the target of what many
scholars have described as genocide, this one perpetrated by the Assad Alawite
regime supported by Iran and Shia militias. The Obama administration’s policies
in the region have made the U.S. a virtual culprit in the ongoing Sunni-Shia
conflict, fighting on the side of the Shia. Pressed on this point, the Realists
will admit that this is indeed a dangerous development, but they will insist
that it was inevitable. For the Realists at heart are quite fatalistic, and are
the ultimate believers in Murphy’s Law: they confuse possibilities with
inevitabilities and draw their policies accordingly, and in process making our
worst nightmares come true as though by design.

Well yeah, I guess that's definitely the important thing to do here .@ErgoOne

Video(s) of the Day

“This fifth anniversary of Syria's
war without end is a bleak moment indeed. Perhaps we have become inured to the
scale of the suffering in what is the heart of the Middle East. The children
who already know nothing else, the displaced, the dead and the dying.” https://youtu.be/gpAfmrj8G7k

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